


Fast (Like Most Things in Life)

by wttlpwrites



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Hand-wavey Science, Hurt Steve, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers Centric, Steve Rogers Feels, also there's a dick scientist, some violence but i wasn't sure if it counted as graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-30 08:51:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5157647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wttlpwrites/pseuds/wttlpwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve is captured by Hydra during what should have been a standard mission. It all happened so fast-</p><p>"It's not enough to take the memories away, the scientist thinks. They won't go willingly. First, the memories need to be broken. Strained and frayed and tainted so that it's not too hard to let them go. <br/>	It's not enough to take them. They need to be given."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fast (Like Most Things in Life)

Like most things in life, it happens fast. 

Like when you're little and you fall off of something, and you don't even register it until the wind is knocked out of you. You can't breathe, and what's that screeching sound? You. 

Fast, sudden, quick. Not enough time to register. 

It happens so fast that Steve can't even process (doesn't want to process) as Bucky's struck down, and the rest of the team is stuck, and then everything goes kind of white around the edges. White like the fuzzy kind of early morning before snow. Then it's just static- after the snow's already been pushed down, stepped on, stomped on, dirty and grey. 

He thinks he might have felt something in his neck. He thinks it probably matters. He can't think anymore. 

 

(It was a standard mission, nothing they hadn’t done dozens of times before. Or at least, it seemed that way at first. But maybe, thinking back, the circumstances were a little strange, the bad guys a little staged. 

Maybe, thinking back, they should’ve been less complacent. Maybe if they had, HYDRA wouldn’t have knocked out Bucky to distract the good captain, wouldn’t have gotten their hands on Steve.)  
\--

It's not enough to take the memories away, the scientist thinks. They won't go willingly. First, the memories need to be broken. Strained and frayed and tainted so that it's not too hard to let them go. 

It's not enough to take them. They need to be given. 

(HYDRA has learned from their mistakes. They know that it isn’t good enough, doesn’t last as long, if you simply brainwash a supersoldier. If said soldier has ties to the memories, the bonds can help to break through the programming. Project Insight may have given them more setbacks than breakthroughs, but HYDRA would persevere. It always has.)

\--

When Steve wakes up, he is immediately on guard. The room feels off, but the particular brand of off is sickeningly familiar. The kind of off that makes you feel like you've missed something, slept too long, woken up very far away from where you fell asleep. 

He knows that the chances he was trapped again for another century are slim, minuscule even, but still. Once is enough to make a guy wary. 

Wherever he is, it's nowhere good. Not a hospital, not with the hard metal he's lying on. Probably enemy, because why the fuck else would he be tied down. 

He hates being restrained. Natural instinct is fight or flight. Even if Steve had always been partial to 'fight', the fact that both of the options are taken away is unsettling. 

Somebody walks into the room. Clicks into the room, shoes loud on the flooring, echoing, and the ricocheted sound waves feel more like clicks of a gun's safety being turned off. 

Steve waits, eyes opened and expectant, screaming on the inside because he still doesn't know what happened after the fight. Doesn't know where the team is. Where Bucky is. 

The person in the room has on a lab coat. That's about all Steve can see, because the lights are off except for the sliver of milky yellow coming from his left. It's probably from the door that let in whoever is scraping their finger against his cheek. 

Steve bites the inside of his lip because, however violated he finds himself feeling, he's always been good at keeping calm. He won't change that now. 

A heavy, quick breath releases from his unwelcome company, something to the likes of a lazy snort. "Wanna see something funny?" The voice gives away nothing about the identity, nothing familiar or even outstanding. Just, quietly amused. 

"Not particularly," Steve says with snark and a churning feeling in his gut. 

"Humor me, then." 

As the words ceased, a screen brightened into existence somewhere in front of Steve. The structure he was lying on (what he previously thought was a table) shifted, gears grinding as it ascended up into a chair-like shape. 

It was positioned now like some sort of demented personal theatre. The screen was perfectly centered, the image- 

Oh god. 

Steve sucked in a quick gasp, eyes widening as he took in the sight. Bucky- tied down and beaten, bloody and bruised, and a gun raised to his head. 

"Where is he?" Steve growled, forgoing his former calm demeanor. The person in the lab coat just smirked, only the bottom half of their face visible in the light of the screen. 

"Nowhere you'll get to him in time," they said with a giddy sort of lilt to their voice.

“What do you want?” He asked desperately.

They laughed. “Nothing you can give.” As if it was some sort of joke. 

"Let him go!" Steve hissed, struggling against the restraints. His eyes were glued to the screen. 

Like most things in life, it happened fast. 

Like when you're little and you can feel yourself tipping over, know that in just seconds it'll be over- except. Except you don't actually think any of it until a split second after it's happened. It's not 'I'm falling'. It's 'i fell.'

It's not 'somebody's shooting Bucky.' It's 'bucky's been shot'. A sound somewhere between an enraged yell and a scream of loss tore it's way through Steve's throat. 

"No!" He thinks he hears himself saying. 

It's fast though. All within the split second some bastard pulled the trigger and Steve sees Bucky go limp, red staining the floor. Oh god. So much red-

Something like a whimper climbs its way past Steve's lips, and Steve is too numb to try and stop it. 

It couldn't be happening again, could it? He couldn't be watching helplessly /again/ as Bucky was taken away from him. Those types of things weren't supposed to happen twice. The bad guys weren't supposed to win. 

Suddenly, the screen flickers off. "No!" Steve yells again, jerking his whole body in an attempt to free himself. "Bucky!" He might be screaming. He doesn't know. 

"Wasn't that great?" The voice asks, as if sharing a joke with a close friend. There is so much wrong with that. 

Steve chokes a bit, tears starting to form as he wonders where the hell he is and how the fuck everything went downhill so quickly. 

A hopeful part of him thinks maybe this is a dream and he'll wake up. But he doesn't, and there's no Bucky to shake him awake and stroke his hair and tell him it was just a nightmare. 

There's no Bucky at all. 

\--

He doesn't remember when he lost consciousness, but he wakes up at some point. 

There's a lag, a short span of time where he doesn't remember what had happened but then it's back and it hasn't gone away and he's still on that fucking table and-

and he can't catch his breath and that makes it worse because the first thing he thinks of is breathe with me, Stevie, you're doing great and that's not ever gonna happen  
again and- 

And then it's over because another thing is stabbed into his neck and Steve hopes to god that this is the last time he wakes up. 

(Steve is not equipped to deal with this again. He was not equipped the first time. Has anyone ever been prepared for something of this caliber? To lose the one thing that matters most? Not everyone has a soulmate. Not everyone wants one. And even so, the two groups are not mutually exclusive. (What if Bucky hadn’t wanted him? -There is not a world Steve can imagine where he does not want Bucky.- ) But to lose a soulmate- not even a man turned closer to a god can stand it.)

\--

"It's going well, I think," the scientist says. "I like this method."

The two people are standing in the observation deck, watching the subject (who they refer to as Cap, between themselves), who's twitching in his ties. 

"It is interesting, I'll give it that," the other one replies. "I like how you did the drugs, tampered with his emotions like that. Probably makes the whole thing more believable."   
"Exactly. See, you gotta make 'em want to get rid of the memories. Makes it easier to get cooperation." The first one gazes at the subject. The scientist is pleased with the progress of the experiment so far, and ready to try more.

"Bring out the screen again."

The command is met with nothing but obedience. 

(There is not a one who considers that what they are doing is wrong. Not a single scientist that wonders whether or not what they are doing is morally sound. Does it matter, in the long run? Everything happens the way it is meant, otherwise something else would have happened.)

\--

Steve needs it to be over. 

Needs to stop seeing these horrible, awful images they keep showing. He can't watch anymore. 

Sometime after they showed him Natasha (or maybe Tony, he can't fit the timeline up quite right), he started trying to close his eyes. 

His eyes are burning, though, won't stay closed before they start feeling like acid. His throat is raw, scraped and bleeding, probably. But he can't stop screaming. He needs them to stop killing his friends. 

(Steve needs it to be over, be over, be over. He doesn’t know how they caught the team or how they managed to subdue them, though maybe a sedative able to knock him out could tame those as utterly human as Natasha, as Tony.)

\--  
(At some point, he stopped seeing the difference between what was happening in the screen and what was happening right in front of him. He stopped feeling the difference between his own sweat and filth and the splattered blood of his loved ones.)

\--  
He knows they're not real. He knows that when he hears Nat humming and feels the ghost of her fingers carding through his hair, that it's not real. He knows that when he thinks he hears Sam's warm laugh, that it's just a figment of his imagination. (Sam can't laugh. The way his throat is cut so deep, there's no sound coming out anymore.)

He knows that the Bucky sitting next to him, hushing his cries and smiling soft, is not. real. 

But. 

It doesn't help that he's traced over his best guy's face with pencil on paper so many times that he knows every detail, so the facsimile is perfect. 

If he was real, though. The real Bucky would help him. This one doesn't bother. 

(And God, these hallucinations are just killing him. He knows they’re all dead, knows it’s his fault, and he doesn’t need to be reminded. Painfully reminded that all of his team, all of his family, is dead and gone and never ever going to laugh again. He saw it, saw the deaths of them all, killed right on TV or right in front of him, he can’t tell and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that these hallucinations are killing him, and he just wants everything to be gone.)

\--

 

Faith had always been easy for Steve. He'd always believed in God, always believed he'd get to Heaven. He went to church on Sundays- the Bucky at his side gives a playful laugh. 'You /tried/ to get me in a church. Wasn't so easy, though, once The Lord's day suddenly became hangover day, huh pal?' - and prayed at nights. 

Prayed during the war. Prayed when he woke up after the war. Prayed to find Bucky. 

It's been awhile since he prayed. 

Faith ain't as easy. 

(And when has it ever been easy? Never. But Steve had always had someone, Bucky or Peggy or SHIELD or a damn purpose. Now, there is nothing, and God made everything, so if there is nothing there is no God, and this makes sense to Steve right now. Makes sense in the way that happens when your mind skips over a few steps but you can’t quite go back and retrace them.)

\--

"I think it's time to move to phase two," the scientist announced to the team. "We've done enough- at this point it's just wasting ti-"

Mutters rippled through those who were watching the observation deck. "What's scheduled that requires contact?" Somebody asks. The scientist's head whips around. 

"Nothing," he snaps. "What's going on out there?" He pushes through the crowd and looks out the window. The door is creaking open to the experimentation room, there's a figure stepping through. 

"Somebody hit the alarm," he calls out loudly, something akin to panic in his voice. 

Too late though. The figure cuts through the space and is at the subject's side in an instant, and then the observation deck explodes and the scientist is nothing but dust. 

(And Bucky had gotten there just in time.)

\--

"Steve," somebody shakes him. "Stevie," he says, desperately. 

But Steve gave up a long time ago that this was all just a nightmare, that Bucky would wake him up with a hey Stevie, you've been sleepin' for ages. He flinches, trying to move away from the hands, because they aren't real and Bucky's dead and he needs to get these damn images out of his head. 

"Steve, please," Bucky rasps, voice breaking. And Rogers never could say no to that voice. 

His eyes open slowly, flickering to and fro as he panics and tries to think of who could possibly be left that they're waking him up for. 

They only ever wake him up to show him someone else's end. But he sees nobody except Bucky's ghost. Steve whimpers. (His pride has not been present for some time. He was defiant, yelling in anger up until the moment he saw no point in it. Probably a little bit after Bruce.) 

"Oh, thank God," 'Bucky' says, releasing a gust of air. "I'm gonna get you out of here, Stevie, okay?"

Steve startles. This is new. Hallucination Bucky never does anything other than sit and pretend Steve wasn't dying. Why is this one different. 

"Steve?" This new phantom asks, sounding worried again. 

"No, no, no," Steve mutters, his head shaking back and forth fast (like most things in life). "You're not real, not real," he sounds strangled even to his own ears, but he does not care. 

But if this Bucky isn't real, then why does his sound of distress make Steve feel torn apart inside? If he isn't real, then how is Steve finding himself set free from restraints? 

It's too confusing. Steve closes his eyes. 

(Steve didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t, hadn’t known since he first opened his eyes in this base. Steve didn’t know, except he thought he did. Words are most dangerous when the speaker believes them, when the liar is unaware of his lies. Steve should know, having once been a piece of propaganda himself, having believed the lies he told for whoever told him to speak. Believed that with enough faith and trust (and pixie dust wasn’t around when he was) that the good guys would win. Steve should’ve known, but Steve didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. Hadn’t since he first opened his eyes.)

\--

Bucky scrubs a hand over his face. He'd left Steve to the mercy of fucking Hydra agents for three fucking weeks. So long that it looks like Steve might've finally snapped. 

It was hard to tell, because he'd been unconscious since before even leaving the base. 

It's been three days and the only thing running through Bucky's head is that broken-sounding "you're not real" that Steve had said, looking at Bucky like he was fucking terrified. 

Of course he's terrified. He's been captured for three weeks. Lord knows what they did to him, but judging from what little Tony and Natasha had been able to intercept, it wasn't pretty. 

Something about showing him uncannily realistic video edits to make him think they were killing people. Based on the way Steve reacted to Bucky, Bucky is probably one of those that are dead in his mind. 

It's all a fucking mess, Bucky thinks as he slouches and grasps Steve's hand. 

\--

It takes another day and a half for Steve to wake up. The doctors say he was in a form of coma- Bucky tuned some of it out but it had something to do with the mind trying to protect itself from trauma. Bucky laughed bitterly when he heard that. 

Wonder why Steve'd need that sort of protection. 

But he does wake up. Sure, he's hyperventilating and it takes Bucky seven minutes to get him to calm his breathing, but he's awake. 

Steve's awake and staring at Bucky like he doesn't know whether to be hopeful or petrified. Bucky's heart breaks a little. 

It wasn't fair. They'd just gotten each other back. If it weren't for that goddamn mission- 

"You're alive," Steve says with caution. Bucky nods quickly. 

"Baby, everything you saw, everything they showed you, it wasn't real, it wasn't any of it real-" Bucky's cut off by Steve's arms wrapped around his neck. The blonde squeezes tightly, probably scared that if he lets go it'll all vanish. 

"You're alive," Steve breathes again, but this time it's more naked relief than fear. Bucky can't explain how good it feels to hold him back just as tightly, to press his lips into Steve's matted hair and assure him over and over again that they're both okay. 

To assure him that everyone is okay and safe and quite a bit worried for him. Steve lets out a strangled sound that might be a laugh, in some time. 

"Buck," Steve whispers, and Bucky is so fucking happy to have him back. They sit there for a while, before the doctors need to come in and do their checks and make sure everything is in place. 

Everything's not in place, but Bucky thinks it might be, soon. 

\-- 

Tony has never been good at waiting. He fidgets, he paces, he finds something for himself to be doing when he can't be fixing the problem. 

Natasha can wait. She's good at it. Comes from years of practice- waiting for orders, waiting for answers from those she's interrogating, waiting for the right time to strike. She's good. 

Tony, though. When the doctors finally say they can go see Steve, he has to hold back an hallelujah, because Christ, he is not good at the whole patience thing. 

Once he actually gets in the room, though, he thinks he might've almost preferred more waiting. 

Steve's face is drawn, looking fearful when they all first come in. The whole team is there, plus Sam and Pepper, because they all figured he needed them. Needed the reassurance. But he just looks scared. 

Until, that is, he leans closer to Bucky and whispers something. Tony swears he sees Bucky's heart shatter, but the former Winter Soldier puts on a strained smile and nods at Steve. (Later, Bucky will let out a sob into Natasha's shoulder and cry, "He asked me if you were real," and Tony will go on living wishing he hadn't eavesdropped.) 

Once Steve gets his confirmation, his face slowly fills with awe, running his eyes over and over the people in his room. Suddenly, though, his breath starts coming faster and faster, and Barnes waves them all out of the room as he works their fearless leader down from a panic attack. 

The whole situation is unsettling, and Tony knows it's going to be a long ride to where they need to be. 

\--

It takes a long time for Steve to fall back asleep. He had kept his eyes pried open for thirty-six hours, the last twenty-four of which had been spent adamantly refusing anyone that tried to talk him into rest. And there was no way in hell Barnes would stand for anyone drugging him up, not this close to his time as a prisoner. 

Bucky stayed awake right along side him, urging him to get some shut-eye the whole time. He didn't understand why Steve so furiously didn't want to. 

"Because when I wake up I'll be back there and you'll be dead again," Steve finally admitted. 

"Oh, Stevie, no," Bucky shook his head, carding his hand through soft blond hair. "No, Steve, I'll be right here."

\--

Some things (most things) in life happen fast. Too sudden to process until after. 

This, though, Bucky thinks as Steve curls into his chest, sleeping. This. 

This will be slow. But as long as they get there, or even close to there, Bucky is happy. 

Will be happy. 

(They will be.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'd love some feedback =)


End file.
